What If We Got It Right? Visions2030 and the Power to Re-think Everything

What if the future didn’t feel like a warning, but a welcome?

What if, instead of bracing for the worst, we reached for a better future?

This is the invitation at the heart of Visions2030, Carey Lovelace’s bold campaign to reawaken the world’s imagination. As she said in a recent interview, she isn’t thinking in city blocks or national borders – she’s thinking of millions, even billions, of individuals. She isn’t trying to persuade them – but to invite them to dream together.

A composer turned art critic, playwright, curator, and now visionary movement-builder, Lovelace has lived many lives in one. All those threads converge here, in a project that asks people to do something radical: not despair, not doomscroll – but dream.

It began with a flash of insight in 2018, what Lovelace calls a “burst of ignition.” At the time, she saw a world steeped in anxiety and division. She asked herself a fundamental question: What if we stopped asking only what’s wrong and began asking what’s possible?

From that seed grew Visions2030, a global initiative to awaken imagination as a social force. Drawing on decades of experience across music, theater, journalism, and critical theory, Lovelace gathered artists, scientists, ethicists, and dreamers around a shared idea: creativity isn’t just for galleries and stages – it’s the engine of change.

“Our images shape our world,” Lovelace says. “The imagination is a kind of magnet. What you hold in your consciousness, you begin to attract.”

And what she’s attracting is remarkable.

In one Visions2030 prototype, a Harlem activist reclaimed vacant lots with flowers and legal strategy, turning public neglect into civic power. In another, hip-hop rhymes taught science concepts in underserved communities. One artist built a floating food barge on the East River to combat urban food deserts. Another reimagined AI with non-Western personas – Indigenous wisdom, doo-wop rhythm, and streetwise tech merged into bots that ask rather than dictate.

The goal isn’t to deliver policy proposals – it’s to awaken possibility. In “Collective Dreaming” workshops, people from all walks of life step into storytelling experiments that open hidden doors within. Out of these sessions emerge ideas and solutions participants never imagined themselves capable of.

“I’ve seen it work,” Lovelace says. “People imagine solutions they never would’ve reached alone. That’s where real change begins.”

If all this sounds lofty, it is – but Lovelace is no stranger to the hard work beneath the vision. She studied under composers like Xenakis and Messiaen, co-commissioned the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and has written for The New York Times and Artforum. She has curated museum exhibitions, produced nationally performed plays, and co-led the International Association of Art Critics.

Her most audacious creation yet is The Lumisphere Experience: not an exhibition or a book, but a platform for global co-authorship. She envisions an immersive festival in Los Angeles – a kind of AI-powered “world’s fair of the imagination” – that will travel the globe. At each stop, people will be asked a single question: What do you want the world to look like?

One part of the project is a massive climate-envisioning tool that invites people to embark on an immersive “journey,” almost like an amusement-park ride, where cutting-edge technology helps them imagine their own “ideal eco-future.”

“So often, to motivate us – particularly in terms of climate – we are pummeled with worst-case scenarios,” she says. “We shame people about their actions or lack of action. But we forget to ask, Where do we want to get to? For each of us, that might be different.”

“There’s a lot we can’t control,” Lovelace continues, “but we can control where we put our focus. When you center yourself on vision rather than fear, everything shifts.”

With one foot in the art world and one in public policy, Lovelace seeks to lead not with fear, but with imagination. “If we can get 10% of people to dream big and act boldly,” she says, “we can make the future better.”

Her approach may be the perfect illustration of what futurist Peter Diamandis once observed: “The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”